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Top Insider Trades 5/1/12: KO, ESGR, WPZ and GOOG

Below are lists of the top 10 mainly open-market insider purchases and sales filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, May 1, 2012 as ranked by dollar value.

Company executives and directors are in the best position to assess the attractiveness of their firms’ shares, and here is how many of them are voting their wallets!

Please note, however, that these are factual lists, not buy and sell recommendations. Dollar value is only one metric to assess the importance of an insider transaction, and further analysis of a stock’s full insider history may not indicate a significant insider signal.

But at Insider Insights, we find significant insider signals just about every day using screens like these to determine where we should focus are subsequent fundamental and technical analysis. And while stocks don’t (and shouldn’t) move up or down based on insider activity alone, insiders tend to be good indicators of when real stock-moving events like earnings surprises, corporate actions, and new products may be in the offing.

So use these regular blog posts as the initial research tools they are meant to be, and click the links in the tables to analyze a company’s or insider’s full insider history. Also feel free to email with any questions on our proprietary insider data, and how it is best analyzed.

Analyst Note: We are currently in a slower filing period for Form 4s since many firms have the trading windows closed to their insiders until March quarter earnings are released. So the dollar values of the Top 10 transactions are smaller than usual. If past is prolog, the volume of insider filings will pick up again in earnest during the first week of May.